The Dead Weight

This is off topic.

 I’ve always had issues with getting up in the morning. I mean, I know everybody does. Or most everybody I associate with does. Occasionally I’ll meet someone who tells me they wake up at 4:30 every day to swim laps or go for a jog. My disgust for these people is overwhelming. They might as well tell me, “Everyday I get a mason jar and put a hamster inside then seal it and watch him suffocate.” All I can think is: you animal.

Losing weight, while it hasn’t been necessarily a super fast process for me, has been relatively easy. I do put thought into it and there is an aspect of it being challenging, but it has been very do-able for me. On the other hand, I’ve spent years trying to find a way to make getting up in the morning easier for me and I haven’t had much luck. If you read anything about it you’ll get simpleminded tips of non-information like, “Go to bed earlier.” Oh, really? You think? That’s great news because I had been sitting in a rocking chair sticking a fondue fork into my thigh for hours trying to stay up until 2:30 every night.

Obviously if you’re staying up late there’s a reason for it. But the bigger issue is that having a hard time waking up in the morning is not always a matter of how much sleep you had the night before. We’ve all had the experience of getting a few hours of sleep and waking up and feeling great, or sleeping for 12 hours and only getting up begrudgingly. I don’t know why this is. You read about a sleep cycle and how it’s easier to get up at certain point along that cycle, and I’m sure that plays a part in it. But I have a feeling it’s not as easy as saying “My sleep cycle is 3.5 hours, so if wake up after 7 hours I’ll be perfectly refreshed.” I have a feeling your cycle can vary from night to night depending on how long you’ve been awake, what you’ve eaten, how much exercise you got and things like that.

So maybe if I got up and went to bed at the exact same time every day and ate a similar type and amount of food every day and got a similar amount of exercise every day, then maybe I would be able to pinpoint the exact amount of sleep I need to make getting up in the morning the most pleasurable. But that always seems like a backwards way to live your life.

What I’ve always wanted were tips that made getting up easier regardless of how much sleep you had or things like that. Something like, “Swallow a tablespoon of cod liver oil before bed and you’ll wake up refreshed.” Unfortunately, I never really found anything like that. But I’ve stumbled across something that has worked really well for me the past few weeks so it may help someone else. It’s not something super clever like the cod liver oil thing would be, but I think it has made getting up for me about 50% less dreadful in the morning. And the tip is simply this: set your alarm for a half hour earlier than you need to get up in the morning. For example, I need to wake up around 8:30 every morning in order to get the things done which I need to get done and leave for work on time. So, for years I’ve set my alarm for 8:30 as that seems to make the most sense. I usually go to bed between 1 and 3 am so I get anywhere between 5 1/2 to 7 1/2 hours of sleep. As an experiment, a few weeks ago I set my alarm for 8 o’clock and I found it was easier getting up in the morning. My first thought was that I was catching the right part of my sleep cycle, but since the amount of time I was sleeping still varied by two hours, that couldn’t be it. But there was no denying  that it was significantly easier.

Here’s my theory as to why it works, and although this is off topic you’ll recognize the same thinking that runs through my posts on weight loss. Theoretically, getting up at 8 should be harder than getting up at 8:30 given that I haven’t changed the time I go to bed at all. But there’s some part of my brain — and maybe this means I’m weakminded that I fall for my own psychological tricks — that says, “I must have no problem getting up at 8, because if I did I wouldn’t have decided to wake up at 8 when I could just as easily have set the alarm for 8:30.” just by setting the alarm earlier than you need to, you are subconciously implying to yourself that you’re more than capable of getting up at that time.

There are two keys to making this work. First, is that you can’t just set your alarm clock a half hour earlier in order to press the snooze button for 30 minutes. Whatever you set it for is the time you get up. The second thing is that you can’t fill that half hour with things to do. I’m not telling you to get up early and journal or salute the sun or anything like that. The reason this works is because you’re getting up early unnecessarily. If you fill that time with something to do, then you’re not getting up early for the hell of it, you’re getting up early to work on your screenplay, or whatever, and you’ll hate getting up again because you’re getting up for some reason.

All I do with that extra half hour is putter around a bit. Take a little more time getting ready. Perhaps cook some breakfast, watch some Sportscenter. And I’m being completely honest when I tell you that it has made getting up much easier for me.

Losing weight, getting up in the morning — these things are frequently issues of mind over matter. By making things unnecessarily difficult to yourself you’re saying, “Hey, I’m a superstar. I find this so easy I’m making it challenging for the sport of it.” And the reptilian part of your brain that usually gets in your way gets fooled. Or at least mine does.